Original Flash Fiction: This Side of Time

by Sarah Grey

Sarah Grey is an attorney, a mother, an art historian, a medievalist, an advocate for the disabled, and a connoisseur of cheese. She was born on Bloomsday, but prefers her fiction short. Her stories have appeared in a number of publications including Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Flash Fiction Online. She lives with her family near Sacramento, California.

You are Husband Seven-Sixty-Five.

You do not know Emily, yet; she’s only fifteen, after all. But she’s identified you and recorded you in the stacks of spiral-bound notebooks she keeps in her parents’ attic beside her machine, alongside purple ballpoint pens, an iPad, a postcard from the National Air and Space Museum, and a plush Nikola Tesla.

These notebooks are so thick with names — forty-seven Jacobs, seventy-three Aidans — that she has no choice but to rely on a number to identify you. It’s impersonal, yes, and she knows you’re the type to be offended by it. She likes that about you.

She’s already drawn an asterisk beside your number.

Based on Emily’s initial screening — a random selection of moments drawn from your first decade together — you are bright, respectably attractive, kindhearted, fond of Thai cuisine and stargazing, and capable of neatly folding laundry.